No streetcar graveyard here…

Somebody…probably not P.T. Barnum…once said “There’s a sucker born every minute.” If they could have looked into the future and seen the internet and, particularly, Facebook, they would have revised that to “…every thousandth of a second.” Not long ago I found this on my Facebook news feed.

I must have some Missouri blood in me, because when somebody tells me about something unbelievable, I just say “Show me.” I never heard of any streetcar graveyard in the NC mountains. But I dutifully contacted everybody that I know who might have. Even the state transportation museum folks down in Spencer, who have scoured the state for artifacts, had never heard of this one.

I could not find, at the time, any other reference to anything connected to this. But over time, I put together a clue here, another there. So here is the real story.

The streetcars, and at least one bus, belong to, or did belong to, a company called the Vintage Electric Streetcar Company of Winber, PA. The pictures were taken on property they owned in that state. You can see pictures of the same cars, sans snow, here:

A post on wikimapia says that the company is “partly defunct”, whatever that means. You can search all you want, but you won’t find much else about them. Some of the streetcars may have ended up at the Rockhill Trolley Museum, which looks like a very cool place.

When I was a kid, the national pastime was baseball. Somewhere along the way it became lying. I’m done with this one.